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© 2018 John D. Brey.

One of the greatest witnesses to the veracity of the Word of God is its perceived inconsistency. There's a form of lie, a form of falseness, that has no external error, inconsistency, or incorrectness. On the contrary. That's why the fool loves and lives a lie. He prefers a lie that's externally consistent, to a truth that's internally, and eternally, the foundation of the world.

Those who deny the veracity of the Gospels often claim the story is contrived after the fact by authors who fabricate the story for a particular affect. In this case to affect the power of the Gospel. And yet these after-the-fact conspirators tell us the great Peter, on Jesus' very right hand, who's willing to die with Jesus, denies he even knew him three times on the night Jesus is betrayed?

More importantly, what about Jesus, the apple of God's eye? . . . The Torah is clear that God could, would, never, ever, forsake a righteous man to injustice. . . And yet the central figure in the Gospel account, the man we're all supposed to be convinced, by the conspiring authors of the Gospels, is God's most righteous creation, hangs bloodied, mangled, bleeding, helpless, fatherless, Godless, on the cross of his conviction, crying out, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

The persons who should have cleaned up the Gospels of contradiction, and most importantly things that contradict the Torah, like a righteous man being betrayed by, forsaken by, God, have done nothing of the sort. On the contrary, the narrative bleeds inconsistency and contrariness in regards to the extant word of God . . . and to a degree so profound, that the honest reader of the Gospels can't help but realize he's either reading the Gospel truth upon which all other truth must be based, or else the basest, the grossest, and most perverted perversion ever concocted.

One man might, in his incompetence, or his ploy, miss, or leave, grotesque contradictions, and idiotic antinomies in the text. But if it's a group conspiracy, each iteration would correct more inconsistencies. Somewhere down the line Jesus claiming to have been forsaken, as one of his final statements, would be removed, since that one statement, hanging on the cross, at the completion of his ministry, is so absurd, so anti-Biblical, so sad and revealing, that no author pro-Gospel, could in good faith leave it in the text.

Jesus lives a righteous life up until the final moment, and then, with his last breath, concedes he's been forsaken by the God of righteousness, the god who, were he (Jesus) truly righteous, would have to himself (god) be put to death (perhaps there on the cross with Jesus) if he were willing to watch a righteous man, the quintessence of righteousness (so we're told) be tortured, spit on, and laughed at, by mindless worms.

God truly forsook Jesus. Totally and completely. For good reason. He was no longer there to help Jesus, since the Cross is the moment of incarnation, when God was no longer out there to help Jesus since he was inside Jesus dying with him on the cross.

"I speak unto you-- from a thorn-bush--- that I am, as it were, a partner in their trouble. . .R. Jannai said: `Just as in the case of twins (te'omim), if one has a pain in his head the other feels it also, so God said, as it were: I will be with him in trouble' (Ps.XCI, 15)."

Midrash Rabbah, Shemos, 2.5.

The New Testament, and the way the text arose, is, so to say, a testament to the veracity and authenticity of the production process. It arose by a process too pristine, too serious, too important, for any codifier to trifle with sacred things, even in order to attempt to correct obvious inconsistencies and contradiction.

The New Testament is too holy to be bothered by inconsistencies and contradiction. If a reader can't swallow the truth because it's grafted onto an imperfection, then they can’t have the body of Christ Jesus, the New Man, grafted onto the old man that’s their own sinful flesh. Flesh which by nature seeks external consistency rather than internal, or eternal, truth. The blood of Christ cleanses the inconsistencies and contradiction in the New Testament even as his blood cleanses any sinful root to which he’s grafted as the branch producing eternal life wherever found.

The Gospels are an oral tradition. They were recited in group settings for decades before they were put down in writing. The ancient world functioned differently than the modern world. No one sat down and wrote the Gospels like a novelist sits down and writes a story.

When the apostles and or those closest to the narrative were dying of old age it was determined that they should dictate the oral tradition to an amanuenses before they died so that it could be archived from the mouth of the sage for future generations. The Gospels are written by an amanuensis who merely put pen to paper as an authoritative speaker recited the oral tradition. Nothing was added or subtracted at the point of being archived since this oral tradition had been heard hundreds of times and was memorized by thousands of people long before it was put down in writing.

The ancient mind trusted memorization more than the written word. Jacques Derrida, who is no theologian, says as much in his, Of Grammatology. Those who had memorized the oral tradition of the Gospels were already distrustful of the written word.

In the book of Acts, we find that there are a number of early Christian groups who were important to the rise of Christianity. Luke was in the Pauline camp. He was Paul's assistant and physician. His Gospel attempts, like Acts, to give a quasi-scientific presentation of the Gospel tradition. His Gospel comes from the oral tradition Paul speaks of without him (Paul) ever giving the internal elements within his letters.

John represents another group, from another geography, and with another emphasis. Same with Mark and Matthew. No one attempted to synthesize the four Gospels into one document. They’re all four living things with their own opinion, their own emphasis, and their own remembrance of events. In spirit they're all true and faithful to what they present. If any contradictions can't be worked out, that’s inconsequential since the written word is always contaminated with the sins of the world.

Paul's letters acknowledge the oral tradition of the Gospels as though they're the background for what Paul comments on. Paul's letters are commentary on the oral tradition of the Gospels since Paul's letters are older than the written Gospels.

Paul's letters are the oldest Christian writing precisely because his commentary wasn't an oral tradition in itself, but merely commentary, in written form, of the extant oral tradition of the Gospels. Paul's letters were written in the fifties, so the oral tradition was well known, and going strong, at that point. The written archive of the oral tradition was composed not long after Paul's letters. John's being the last of the Gospels to be written; John being the last living person who walked with Jesus.

There were dozens (surely more) oral traditions of the Gospel. Every person who knew and loved Jesus could have started an oral tradition. But the four canonical Gospels (which probably shouldn’t have been canonized as a closed-canon) are associated with people who were part of the inner circle of Jesus of Nazareth. The four Gospels were considered to have circumscribed most of the other Gospel traditions, or at least the most trustworthy aspects of what could have been hundreds or thousands of Gospel traditions.

Would that we had all Gospel traditions. It was a mistake, encouraged by the times, to have created a closed-canon. The closed-canon was designed to weed out lies and corrupt oral traditions of Jesus, like say, Toledot Yeshu. . . But time and tide would have dealt with the forgeries and the falsification while leaving a greater understanding of the true traditions many of which were like the baby thrown out with the bath water.

Toledot Yeshu is a great example in that it contains extremely valuable information about Jesus not found in any of the authorized texts. There are some things in Toledot Yeshu that prove Jesus' divinity more clearly than any of the authorized texts. A bastardized oral tradition of Jesus, Toledot Yeshu, reveals truism about Jesus that Jesus' own disciples didn't understand enough to record, and therein make Toledot Yeshu extremely valuable to the Christian world.

Because its not archived in ink, but blood, the oral tradition flows, it changes, as they say in the moves: It’s Alive!

Which segues into the commandment given by God not to write oral Torah, and not to memorize written Torah. Throughout Jewish scriptures it's well-known that the written Torah is not to be memorized, or recited, and the oral Torah is not to be archived in ink . . . only blood.

So why did the Masoretes chose to write the oral Torah on top of the written Torah (by adding points to the cipher text thereby nailing the oral Torah down with the dead letter)? Because they didn't want the oral Torah to evolve past the tribe of Israelites who were not even the primary target audience for the cipher text. They wanted to nail God down, killing the living breath of the Torah, as a guarantee that this small tribe of Israelites could thereafter speak on God's behalf as though having killed the freedom of the tradition to evolve, they could keep it wrapped up in a lambskin straight-jacket and only bring it out to do dances, or be glad-handed, and or spoken for.

The oral tradition that John delivered changed dramatically from the time of the crucifixion to the time it was archived. And it shouldn't have ever been archived. That was the Christian’s Jewish original sin: trying to protect the living word by dousing it in formaldehyde and ink.

John's Gospel, to a degree that’s utterly amazing, comes closest to Paul's letters since Paul was far ahead of the other Apostles and knew the temple was no longer part of the true religion. The rest of the Gospel writers still clung to the Temple cult until AD 70. With the Temple destroyed, John's letter evolved into the clearest of the four Gospels so far as teaching Pauline doctrine.

Prior to the destruction of the Temple, the other disciples tended to doubt Paul, or misunderstand Paul. After the destruction of the Temple, John realized Paul's point (about the distinction between sign and referent, the temple being a sign of its referent) and incorporated it into his Gospel. That's the power of an oral tradition versus a written one. The oral is still alive and can grow, change, adapt to new information and circumstances.

. . . because it was "unwritten," the Oral Torah became an ingenious instrument of change that facilitated evolution even as it sustained continuity. The tragedy of Jewish fundamentalism is that it turned the Oral Torah into a second Written Torah and thereby robbed Judaism of any capacity to transform itself.

Ismar Schorsch, Canon Without Closure: Torah Commentaries, p. 252.

The finally definitive move for the Rabbis was to transfer all Logos and Sophia talk to the Torah alone, thus effectively accomplishing two powerful discursive moves at once: consolidating their own power as the sole religious virtuosi and leaders of `the Jews,’ and protecting one version of monotheistic thinking from the problematic of division within the godhead. For the Rabbis, Torah supersedes Logos, just as for John [the apostle], Logos supersedes Torah. Or, to put it into more fully johaninine terms, if for John the Logos Incarnate in Jesus replaces the Logos revealed in the Book, for the Rabbis the Logos Incarnate in the Book displaces the Logos that subsists anywhere else but in the Book.

Border Lines, Rabbi Daniel Boyarin, Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, Berkeley.

In numerous studies of Paul's letters it's pointed out that he constantly refers to the "tradition" his students had previously received, to which his letters are merely commentary, addendum. Paul is very clear that he accepts the "tradition" as received by his students, and as presented in the oral teaching of the Gospel, that was spreading around the world like a wild fire. Paul offers a new gloss on that tradition. He doesn't offer a new tradition, but a new interpretation of the extant Gospel.

That new interpretation accepts the full legitimacy of the oral tradition. It's similar to the Talmud's relationship to the Pentateuch. The Talmud isn't a new Pentateuch. It doesn't always refer directly to the Pentateuch. It says things that aren't always easy to associate with the Pentateuch. But the Talmud is 100% an outgrowth of the Pentateuch, as Paul's letters are 100% an outgrowth of the synoptic Gospels.

There were all kinds of oral traditions growing around Jesus. It was nothing like the relatively (in comparison) orderly evolution that occurred around the sacred text of the Torah received from Moses. The Torah received from Moses was the authority for all commentary.

Similarly, Jesus' words were the supposed authority for all Christian commentary. But the Torah text was archived in stone, letters, unchanging, divinely ordained. Jesus' words were, hearsay, memory, subject to almost infinite interpretation. There's no archive of Jesus' words. No temporal proof of what they were or what he meant by them.

Which is where the essay Masoretic Malfeasance comes into play. The truly sacred text was a cipher: a written string of consonants with no way to determine where word breaks, sentence breaks, paragraphs, or concept differentiation, starts and stops. . . It was designed that way for a reason. Like Jesus' words, it was supposed to be open-ended. Even though that open-endedness leaves it open to multifarious interpretations.

The nature of Jesus' words, like the nature of the pre-pointed string of consonants, though they appear to be a weakness, are in fact divine strength. The MT, and the written Gospels, all closed-canons, are the work of weak, faithless, heartless, idolaters, who want to own the word of God, and protect the word of God, by imprisoning the word of God, nailing it, him, down . . . with points, or nails, or canons, that are under the authority of the religious virtuosi who fancy their great idolatry as great faith. Who, because of their weak faith, believe God needs them, requires them, hasn’t preordained a plan that could function with or without them.

The Spirit of God is alive and powerful. It has nothing to fear from the unfaithful and ignorant. Canons are the work of unfaithful and ignorant men who fancy their religious zeal as the same thing as living faith. The MT is a Jewish canonization of a living cipher that formerly spoke to anyone indwelt with the Spirit of God in their own ethnic or religious garb. When a true believer sees the nakedness of the holy cipher, its allegedly vulnerability, they’re encouraged to serve God in the spirit of truth forsaking the weapons of the world, and the fear of the unbeliever or heretic.

In the so-called "Old" testament, first came the written Torah, and then the oral, verbal, evolution of the written archive. The Talmud, which was originally an oral tradition, forbidden to be written down, worked from the written text of the Pentateuch such that the latter is the authority, and the former, the Talmud, is the evolutionary interpretation that gives life, breath, evolution, inspiration, even perspiration, to the dead letter.

In the "New" testament, Jesus' words (a type of the written Torah received from the hand of God) are oral, and it's Paul's letters, the commentary, that are written. The commentary, as a written text, is secondary to Jesus' words, which are living, breath, and which should not be written down in the written Gospels associated with the so-called canon.

This inversion of oral and written is crucial to the distinction between Judaism and Christianity. Judaism makes the dead letter, the written text, written by what the pen-is in the ancient typologies, the authority from which the oral tradition, the Talmud, grows and gains its life. In Christianity, the seminal message doesn't come from what the pen-is in the ancient typologies. It comes from the tongue, and goes to the ear, where it arrives in the mind, the heart. The source of the Christian tradition is oral, non-phallic, virgin.

Modern Judaism privileges the written text over the spoken word. Christianity makes the spoken word (milah: “we are the circumcision . . .”) the seminal event which, should never be written, except in commentary extant from the actual oral tradition. The oral tradition can never be "written" without that archival desire being type and typology of the crucifixion of the living word. There shouldn’t be a written version of the Gospels. There shouldn’t be a closed-canon.

Paul is the most faithful servant of Christ in the sense that he didn't speak for Jesus. He didn't write the Gospel message. He left that an oral tradition only authoritatively received by mouth. In his letters, where he used what the pen-is in the ancient world, he never "wrote" oral Gospel. He merely commented on it. He is the true and faithful servant of Jesus Christ. . . He’s more to be trusted than the divine element that used what the pen-is to write the written Torah given to Moses. Paul is a greater and a more faithful servant/witness to God than the hand that penned the written archive given to Moses. Paul is more faithful than Gevurah. Paul is greater than Gevurah.

Modern Judaism despises Paul for precisely that reason. Paul is more faithful than the element that gave Moses the written Torah. Paul refused to write the seminal tradition come from the mouth of God. The element that gave Moses the written Torah transgressed the law in the very giving of the law. The seminal was written with what the pen-is when in truth, brit milah is the obliteration and abrogation of what the pen-is in ancient typology.

Paul's letters refuse to "write" (with what the pen-is in fallen history) the seminal message come from the breath of God. Paul refused to trifle with sacred things. He never used what the pen-is to father young, nor to father living Torah. He used the pen only to comment on what must remain alive, dangerous, subject to interpretation, emendation, evolution, world without end. Paul trusted the Spirit, the breath, of God, to slay his enemies, at his own good time, without the power of the pen. In Paul’s mind the sword of the Spirit is more powerful than the pen.

We can't "write" seminal truth. It has to be spoken from one who has it, to one who knows the other has it, and wants to receive it. The pen can poke and choke and write laws and condemn. But it can’t change a heart. Commentary can be written, since it's a type of truth that acknowledges that it’s already contaminated by what's added when what the pen-is (in spiritual parlance) contaminates what prior to writing was still sacred.

If a person is searching for the truth, commentary can point them in the right direction, but the write direction is the wrong direction. The written word can only point to something that must be received from a living breath, a living word, a word imbued with spirit that can't fit into script without bursting out of the side of the script to be caught only by someone who knew the value of what came in the script only to bleed out of it into the world of time and tide and lover and hater.

Genuine theology revolves around the fact that Paul never wrote the oral tradition of the Gospel but merely commented (in writing) on the oral tradition. One of the great divides between Christianity and Judaism, as pointed out by Professor Susan Handelman (Every Rabbi is Jesus), with others, like Rabbi Boyarin, is whether the written word is the ontological foundation of God's revelation to man, or, per Christianity, the Logos, the spoken word (milah), is the foundation of God's revelation to mankind.

In Judaism Moses delivers the written word written by the pen of God. It's the commentary on the written revelation that can't, by law, be "written." ---- In Paul, that ontic theological foundation is turned upside down, literally reversed: Paul will "write" commentary, but he will not write oral tradition. For Paul, the oral tradition is ontological, the foundation of the revelation from God, and thus cannot, should not, be written down. Writing it down contaminates it with the original sin of Adam since in all serious theology what the pen-is is parallel to what the phallus is in the origin of the fall of mankind.

Theoneustos means "breathe." All scripture is God "breathed." -----Breathing and writing are two different things. One comes from the tongue and the other from what the pen-is in relationship to scripture. Adam came from the first, and Cain the latter. Only what Jesus said (breathed) is scripture. And once it's written down it's come through the organ that contaminates with the original sin of Adam as that original sin comes (so to say) through what the pen-is on the human body.

The written word is Cain. Only the spoken word has any semblance to Adam prior to the original sin. The foregoing implicitly explains (so to say) why two biblical truths are poo pooed so vehemently: original sin, and the fact that phallic-sex is the original sin. Get rid of these two truths and no one will know that the written Gospels (and Torah) are Cain. They will use the hairy-backed brute strength of the written word as best they Cain against the perceived weaklings who are born of the breath (hebel) of God, and in the likeness of prelapsarian-Adam.